eck.

By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the
most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women
in literature, and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art
and tact that her very faults canonize her, and her weakness crowns the
triumph of her chastity. In depicting the character of Lovelace, the
novelist had a difficult task, for to have made him a mere ruffian would
have been to ruin the whole purpose of the piece. He is represented as
witty, versatile, and adroit, the very type of the unscrupulous
gentleman of fashion of the period. He expiates his crimes, at the close
of a capital duel, by the hands of Colonel Morden, a relative of the
Harlowe family, who has seen Clarissa die. The success of _Clarissa_,
both here and in France, was extraordinary. As the successive volumes
appeared, and readers were held in suspense as to the fate of the
exquisite heroine, Richardson was deluged with letters entreating him to
have mercy. The women of England knelt sobbing round his knees, and
addressed him as though he possessed the power of life and death.

The slow and cumbrous form of _Clarissa_ has tended to lessen the number
of its students, but there is probably no one who reads at all widely
who has not at one time or another come under the spell of this
extraordinary book. In France its reputation has always stood very high.
Diderot said that it placed Richardson with Homer and Euripides,
Rousseau openly imitated it, and Alfred de Musset has styled it the best
novel in the world. To those who love to see the passions taught to move
at the command of sentiment, and who are not wearied by the excessively
minute scale, as of a moral miniature-painter, on which the author
designs his work, there can scarcely be recommended a more thrilling and
affecting book. The author is entirely inexorable, and the reader must
not hope to escape until he is thoroughly purged with terror and pity.

After the further development of Fielding's genius, and after the advent
of a new luminary in Smollett, Richardson once more presented to the
public an elaborate and ceremonious novel of extreme prolixity. The
_History of Sir Charles Grandison_, in seven (and six) volumes, appeared
in the spring of 1754, after having been pirated in Dublin during the
preceding winter. Richardson's object in this new adventure was, having
already painted the portraits of two virtuous young women--the on